Techno Constructivist: Come see me at TIES

This year I will be presenting one pre-conference workshop, one poster session (which was originally going to be a community of interest session), and co-presenting two general sessions at the TIES Conference in Minneapolis, MN. The theme of the conference is "It's Personal! Transforming Pedagogy with Technology."

I intend with these sessions to raise the question of what the difference is between personAL and personalIZED since from the keynote speaker and featured speaker lists it seems no distinction was made. Hopefully this was done intentionally with hopes of invoking a debate. In fact, School of One founder Joel Rose is giving the opening keynote address. In case you are unfamiliar with School of One, it is a new school model which takes testing, student profiling, and differentiated instruction to new heights of programmed instruction letting an algorithm determine a student's educational journey.

"I love the algorithm." That line always gets me. Anyway, with the keynote on Monday being Joel Rose and the keynote on Tuesday speaking about video games in education I sense a strong grip of scientific management taking hold with this agenda. In Seymour Papert's (1993) book Mindstorms he said, "In most contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child." I want to see children programming the computer. I want to see children in charge of their own learning. Problem is, programming children is easily marketable, teaching children to program is not.

So, here are the sessions I will be presenting. I hope to see you there:

"I Didn't Know I Could Do That with a Cell Phone!" (Pre-conference Workshop) - TIES Conference, December 11, 2011, MPLS, MN
"Citizen Journalism in the Classroom" (session) - TIES Conference, December 13, 2011, MPLS, MN
"Web 2.0 and Social Constructivism" (poster session) - TIES Conference, December 12, 2011, MPLS, MN
"The Power of Many: How (and Why) to Organize Your Own Unconference" (session) - TIES Conference, December 13, 2011, MPLS, MN

Also, on another note, I just had a lesson plan on Citizen Journalism published at EDTECH: Focus on K-12. Check it out and let me know what you think.